“…and 10 of your own”

For reasons too mundane to detail, I have paid several visits to the Nursery Pavilion at Lord’s over the last fortnight.

The Nursery “Pavilion“ isn’t really a pavilion, in the cricket sense, but actually a corporate hospitality venue, tastefully decorated with a selection of cricketing quotes, insightful, funny, and satirical.

One, attributed to G H Hardy, caught my attention.

Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and 10 of your own.

And I felt obliged to defend the honour of the game I have played for more than 50 years, and coached now for 15.

Hardy’s words appear alongside aphorisms from contributors as diverse as Stephen Fry and Tommy Docherty. Some serious, some fatuous; some showing genuine feeling for the great game, some only demonstrating an extreme absence of understanding of the game.

I had to look up Hardy — my knowledge of early C20th Oxbridge mathematicians is sadly limited — but was not surprised by what I found out.

An outstanding academic, a great enthusiast for the (numbers of) the game of cricket. Not, perhaps, ever a team player. There is a photograph of him leading his cricket team onto the field (would anyone else have him in their team?), but his interest in the game appears to have been principally as a spectator, and expert-beyond-the-boundary.

I rather suspect his comments are derived as much from his time in academic common rooms as in cricket changing rooms!

Because in the cricket teams I have played in, I don’t think I have ever encountered a player who actively schemed against his team mates, or celebrated their failures.

Yes, I have certainly played with and (more often) against people I didn’t like that much. And I’m sure I have picked up my game against certain opponents. And, maybe, gone just a little easier against someone we have enjoyed playing against in the past but now was struggling with his game.

But I have never seen a team mate deliberately drop a catch off a rival, or try to run out a team mate as he approached a batting milestone.

Yes, in a team sport where you most often perform by yourself (no-one else can bowl the ball for you, nor hit the ball when you are on strike), individual performances matter. And, if you want to be selected again, next week, scoring a few more runs than a team mate, or grabbing an extra wicket, does keep you ahead in the pecking order.

And the least successful player in a winning team will always be looking over his shoulder at a player outside the XI who could take his place.

But a desire to be more successful personally does not roll over into wanting a team mate to fail, in my experience.

Of course, it might be very different in a competitive, high performance environment. I have never come close to playing at that level.

Neither did GH Hardy.